Electrical shavers or trimmers for trimming facial and body hair are well known. Two types of electric shavers are currently available. These are the foil shaver-type and the rotary shaver-type.
The foil shaver type includes a thin metal mesh covering a cutter blade as it moves over the surface of the mesh. Hair extends through the apertures of the metal mesh, and is caught in a scissoring action between the metal mesh and the cutter. Foil shavers are available in single, dual, and triple foil heads.
The rotary shaver includes a blade rotating on axis which is covered by a circular head extending perpendicularly to the axis of rotation. The circular heard also includes apertures in it through which hair is received to be cut off in a shearing action between the blade and the circular head.
However, both of these types of shavers require the user to typically traverse the same area a few times before all of the hair is trimmed and the shaving process is completed. These processes rely on the ends of the hair to be inserted through the respective apertures of the circular head and the foil mesh. A persons hair may not all be uniformly oriented, especially when it is long. For this reason, these shavers are unsuited to trimming longer hair. The holes or slits in the mesh could be enlarged, but this would increase the risk of a user's skin touching the moving blade and causing injury.
Other shavers include the linear reciprocating shavers, one example of which is produced by Wahl™. This includes a pair of flat planar blades abutting each other, and moving in a linearly reciprocating fashion relative to each other. The blades each define a row of teeth along one edge. The relative movement between the teeth defines a cutting zone where hair is caught in a scissoring action between the respective sets of teeth.
However, these shavers also inherently unsuited to provide as close a shave as the foil shaver or rotary shavers are. This is because such shavers are typically robustly designed for trimming long hair. The closeness of the shave afforded by these types of shaver is limited by the thickness of their blades.
Another problem with the linear reciprocating motion-type shavers is that their blades cannot be too thin, as this may result in them being sharp enough to cut a user.
In this specification, where reference has been made to external sources of information, including patent specifications and other documents, this is generally for the purpose of providing a context for discussing the features of the present invention. Unless stated otherwise, reference to such sources of information is not to be construed, in any jurisdiction, as an admission that such sources of information are prior art or form part of the common general knowledge in the art.
In this specification, where reference has been made to a series of steps in a process or method, this should not be construed as establishing a chronological order for the steps.